SOMEWHERE YOU CAN PRACTICE: Finding you're having trouble shouting at the TV when Jack Straw pops up? There's a nifty stop the war game which allows you to use your yelling to aid the arms inspectors. It's kind of cute. Don't try it at the office, though, or you'll end up being looked at odd.

 
'HE'S KILLED HIS OWN PEOPLE', YOU KNOW: We were pondering the Aaronovitch piece a little further this morning - I know, we should move on, shouldn't we? - and kept coming back to the precision of challenging someone to show evidence of Britain using chemical weapons on a Welsh village in the last twenty years. As it happened, Aaron sent us the following, which pretty much says what we were going to:
I'm watching Jack Straw give his speech at the Royal Institute for Public Affairs, and he's making the point that, had the British government chosen to kill large sections of the population, namely, the large Pakistani community that exists in his constituency, just 12 years ago, then surely British people would live in fear of that happening again. This explains, in his eyes, why Iraqi scientists cannot tell the truth to weapons inspectors.

Since the threat of war in Iraq raised its head, the one thought that keeps going through -my- head is - how can I trust the government of a country which just 15 years ago was colluding with one set of paramilitaries to kill those people - its own citizens - who it percieved to be a threat.

Am I the only person thinking this way?

 
BLAIR TO BUSH: IRN keep reporting that Bush and Blair spent a long time talking on the phone this morning. I wonder why...
- It's me, Tony
- Huh?
- Blair...
- Huh?
- You know, from England...
- New England? Are you some sort of governor?
- Well, in a way, I suppose. I'm the Prime Minister of England...
- Huh? Does your governor know you're calling me?
- Is there anything I can do for you, George? Do you have a date for when we start bombing? Please? Have you got some evidence? Anything?
- Who is this again? Did you want Dick?

 
ALL THE IRAQI EXILES WANT THEIR HOMELAND TORCHED: Or so the pro-bombers would have you believe. Aaronovitch - and we're not feuding with him, he's just a handy example - asked where the Iraqis were on the march on Saturday, implying that anyone who's fled the Saddam regime supports the war. Now, we don't know if any Iraqis marched. But let's see what ten seconds with Google can find us...
Kamil Mahdi in The Guardian - "The Bush administration has enlisted a number of Iraqi exiles to provide an excuse for invasion and a political cover for the control of Iraq. People like Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya have little credibility among Iraqis and they have a career interest in a US invasion. At the same time, the main forces of Kurdish nationalism, by disengaging from Iraqi politics and engaging in internecine conflict, have become highly dependent upon US protection and are not in a position to object to a US military onslaught."
Nidhal al Shibid, talking to CNN - "During the anti-war demonstration in central London she was "overwhelmed" by the support for the Iraqi cause. Her own protest board read: "I am an Iraqi and I thank you for your support."
Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress has rejected the US plans for occupation after Saddam's overthrow.
Now, obviously, we wouldn't attempt to say that our examples demonstrate that all Iraqi exiles are against America's plans, but we would hope the 'bomb now' brigade would also take the same care to point out that there exists Iraqis who hope to have a home to return to, rather than a bomb crater to visit.

 
DON'T BE AFRAID... BE READY: Thanks to Graham F for alerting us to the existence of Ready.gov - From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security - the website to reassure you that, if the worst happens, your local Ned Flanders are going to go down holding a checklist.
Don't be afraid. Be ready.
What's most splendid about this whole effort is how fucking useless it is. The Cold War era Duck and Cover/Protect and Survive style stuff might have been pathetic and full of useless advice, but at least you could believe in it - yes, if I paint my windows white and sit under a door propped against the wall, I can survive a four megatonne blast and merely wait until the radiation has gone. In 2003, presumably fearful of being sued by mutants after an 'event', the Department of Homeland Security can't even sound convincing: "If there is a significant radiation threat, health care authorities may or may not advise you to take potassium iodide... It may or may not protect your thyroid gland, which is particularly vulnerable, from radioactive iodine exposure." Good. Thanks for that which may or may not be reassuring.
If There is an explosion, take shelter against your desk or a sturdy table.
Clearly, of course, if you work in a place where you don't have a desk, you are working class and your survival is of less importance. But remember, you can purchase your own sturdy table and keep it with you at all times.
While it is possible that you will see signs of a biological attack, as was sometimes the case with the anthrax mailings... the biological agent will not always come in an envelope with 'Death to America signed FOREIGNERS and not Americans with access to anthrax at all, oh no' letters slipped inside them.
If there is an explosion or other factor that makes it difficult to control the vehicle, pull over, stop the car and set the parking brake. No, really, we're not making these up. We're sure somewhere on the site there must be something about not throwing yourself on top of bombs, and not licking the sores of someone with smallpox.
Interestingly, with all this handy-dandy information, the Department of Homeland Security seem to have forgotten the possibility that Al-Qaeda or other terrorists may, as they have in the past, merely walk into a building and start spraying automatic weapon fire at random. Indeed, this is surely the most likely form of attack that a terror event in America would take, as unlike bombs, nuclear material and spores of poisonous diseases, getting hold of guns and ammo in the US isn't difficult and way, way less likely to arouse suspiscion. But then maybe the government is less keen to alert its people to the very real danger the corner gun store represents...

 
AARONOKVETCH: David Aaronovitch is clearly so distressed at turning into a cheerleader for the Americano-English attacks on Iraq, he's taken to spouting rhetorical questions.
In yesterday's Guardian, he addressed an open letter to the peace marchers. I didn't go on the march - I had a note from matron and sat the thing out with the wheezy boys and half-time oranges, but David's device is a curious piece of lazy journalism. "I wanted to ask those on the demo some questions" he started - well, why didn't you? There were two million of them in London, it's not like they'd be tricky to find. We can only conclude that the reason is that his lofty questions didn't totally stand up to the obvious rejoinders to most of them. So, in order to help the poor lamb, we've endeavoured to respond to many of his points:
I wanted to ask those who went on the demonstration some questions. I wanted to ask whether, among your hundreds of thousands, the absences bothered you? The Kurds, the Iraqis - of whom there are many thousands in this country - where were they? Why were they not there?

Maybe many of the Iraqis were too busy fighting to be allowed to stay in the UK - after all, we are deporting Iraqi asylum seekers back to the Saddam regime on the grounds that - as Jack Straw put it when he was Home Secretary - there’s a strong independent judiciary in Iraq? The continued claims by the pro-air-war lobby that Iraqis want their country flattened is a bit irksome. Maybe you should read some of the posts to the Iraqi voices section of Open Democracy? Wanting Saddam out of power is not the same as not wanting half a million casualties in the country to be the means to that end.

When Tony Benn was confronted by a young pro-war Iraqi woman on Channel 4 news on Saturday night, why did he describe the organisations of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition as "CIA stooges"?

Who knows? But Tony Benn is not the entire peace movement, any more than the young pro-war Iraqi woman is the Whole Population of Iraq. I’d imagine that expatriate Iraqis would be more prepared for the population of Baghdad to endure a spot of airwarfare than the ones who actually still try to live there.

Did some of the slogans bother you? Do you really believe that this parroted "war about oil" stuff is true? If so, what were the interventions in oil-less Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan about?

Well, Afghanistan was slap-bang in the middle of that gas pipeline, and wasn’t one of the first things the Northern Alliance got round to green lighting that particular project? Kosovo and the Balkans were, of course, pursued under a different tenant of the White House who, oddly enough, wasn’t a former oilman from a family which had made their money in the oil industry. Funny that. Besides, why exactly would the US intervening to stop the destabilisation of Southern Europe mean that the Iraq Crisis couldn’t be about oil? In fact, to turn your logic back - why is it the oil rich state that’s being pursued so strongly on the suspicion of weapons, while North Korea is being allowed to run about waving its nuclear willy?

What did you feel about the marchers wearing stickers bearing the Israeli flag and the words "the fascist state"?

Well, the whole point about the march is not that it was two million people who agree on absolutely everything; just that many people with such wildly differing viewpoints on everything were agreeing on one point: Not this war, not like this. In fact, anyone who really wants to see Israel driven into the sea would be more likely to be pushing for Baghdad to be bombed tomorrow, as the possibility of turmoil in the middle east is more likely to bring down the present shaky arrangement than anything else. Last time round, of course, Saddam lobbed a couple of missiles in Tel Aviv’s general direction.

Did you say to yourself, "Actually, there's only one fascist state in this equation, and it's the one we're effectively marching to save"?

Again, your assumption that the marchers want to support Saddam rather than the Iraqi people is at best mischievous, at worst malicious.

If you got to Hyde Park, did some of the speeches bother you? How about the equivalence used by Tony Benn, as in, "If there are inspectors in Iraq, I want to see inspectors in Israel, inspectors in Britain and inspectors in America"? Name Welsh villages attacked with chemical weapons by British bombers in the past 20 years.

And here you’ve made a giant leap. The inspectors are there not because of what Saddam has done in the past, but to see that he keeps to his international obligations. And, really, why should anybody who believes nuclear or chemical weapons to be evil and wrong object to inspectors checking that America and Britain are keeping within the rules? Maybe if the US had been watched a little more closely, they’d never have had all the anthrax blowing around in their mail boxes. Maybe if the UK had been forced to keep a closer reign on its legitimate biological stocks, we wouldn’t have had our beaches awash with phials of poison. Or should we only worry about such weapons when they’re held by a foreign power?

Do you agree with Harold Pinter that the US is "a country run by a bunch of criminals ... with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug"? Is there any word in that sentence, apart from Tony, Blair and Christian, that isn't quite mad?

I’d imagine a lot of them don’t. (Although, actually, Bush’s history of driving drunk does actually mean, yes, he is a criminal, although not in the sense Pinter meant; likewise Cheney’s little problem with fraud). Some may feel that America is acting legally but disproportionately. Some might think that the professed aim to ignore the UN if they don’t get their way would suggest at least criminal intent. A few might think that Bush’s rejection of the creation of an International Court to pursue War Criminals means that, yes, the Americans are happier siding with those operating outside the law than those who stick to their international obligations. But still others would neither know nor care what Pinter thinks or says. The march, you might remember, was against the war on Iraq; as far as I know nobody went along thinking they were being asked to endorse any of Harold Pinter’s viewpoints. Further; I’d imagine that many thousands on Saturday have no idea who or what Harold Pinter is.

What about rail union leader Bob Crow's suggestion that the government be brought down by civil action? Are you up for that?

But David, if agreeing with one thing someone says means you have to agree with everything they’ve said, does this mean that we should now pull out parts of George Bush’s policies and wave them at you? No, that would be ridiculous.

If you think that it's all nonsense but you don't mind, then perhaps you can explain the extraordinary speech by Charles Kennedy MP. Here is the boss of a top party, yet one cannot tell what his view on war against Saddam actually is. Instead his speech was all about how unconvincing Blair's arguments were. "I have yet," he said, "to be persuaded that the case for war against Iraq has been made." It's been made, Charles, and if you don't agree with it, why don't you just say so?

Erm... his view is that a case hasn’t been made to justify the war. I don’t think that’s “extraordinary”; indeed, it’s more extraordinary that Powell and Blair seem to think that the odd photo with a “BOMBS HERE” label and a “trust me” smile is the same as making a case? Kennedy isn’t convinced. Nor are a lot of people.


Stop blathering on about how "people are suspicious and scared" and tell them what you think ought to be done. Or is there a serious case for war, but you didn't want to say so in front of a million demonstrators?

If Kennedy believed there was a serious case for war, its hugely unlikely that he would have bothered to turn up at the demo, isn’t it?

Back to those demonstrators, and just to ask, do you believe that Blair should act on your demands because so many people turned out on Saturday? If so, do you also think he should halt plans for the housing of asylum seekers in Lee-on-Solent because, at the same time as you marched, one-third of Lee's entire population took to the streets to demand no asylum seekers in their town?

The funny thing is, of course, that the Lee-on-Solent march will almost certainly lead to a change in policy, as these sorts of things usually do. And ultimately, most people hope the government will at least consider the views of the public they’re meant to represent not because they go on marches, but because they’re meant to.


Did the way the demo was reported in Baghdad bother you? Not your fault, but did you have any worry afterwards that it might make Saddam more obdurate and not less? Or maybe, like Benn, you don't much care.
Yes, of course. The marchers had total control over Iraqi TV - they’d signed a contract like the Zeta-Jones one with Hello!. Are you suggesting that the march may have been used for propaganda purposes in Iraq, David? Shocking that, what with State TV there usually shaming Fox Tv in the fair and unbiased stakes.

While we're about it, why do you think Saddam readmitted inspectors after nearly five years in the first place? Was it because he felt it was the right thing to do? Or was it because of the threat of force?

Why were the weapons inspectors withdrawn in the first place? Wasn’t it because the West warned them they were about to be bombed?

If it was the latter, what does this tell you? Should your protest bear fruit, are sanctions part of your preferred containment strategy (should you desire one)? If not, what replaces them? What do you mean, you don't know?

There are probably two million different answers to this. But, of course, David, you choose to assume that the marchers are morons, who haven’t considered what the other options could be. Maybe some of them haven’t - perhaps they just have a small feeling in their guts that dropping bombs which fry people unfortunate enough to have a pacemaker installed, or which forces the air up so that its as if your lungs are being forced through your nose, or which just smashes your body to pieces isn’t the right way to liberate the people and bodyparts that remain after. Perhaps?

Finally, what are you going to do when you are told - as one day you will be - that while you were demonstrating against an allied invasion, and being applauded by friends and Iraqi officials, many of the people of Iraq were hoping, hope against hope, that no one was listening to you?

In the best case scenario, they’ll probably smile and be thankful that they were listened to, and amused that the Iraqi officials who were deposed in a genuinely popular revolution ever thought that a concern for a people was an endorsement of the state. In the worst case, we’ll never know as it’s unlikely that anyone will pay any attention. But did you read the interview in your own paper with the Iraqi deserter? "We want America to attack because of the bad situation in our country. But we don't want America to launch air strikes against Iraqi soldiers because we are forced to shoot and defend. We are also victims in this situation." The Iraqis want to be helped, but they don't want to be bombed. A ground invasion would probably result in wave after wave of quick surrenders. What the Iraqi people don't seem to want is an America War, which involves the unloading of planeloads of bombs onto the heads of those they claim to be saving.

You could still be right and I could be mistaken. A war could be far bloodier than I imagine, the consequences far worse than I believe they will be. It is just possible that a new Iraqi government, instead of moving towards democracy, might be a corrupt oligarchy. All I can say is that the signs look relatively promising in both Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Really? Kosovo, maybe. But Afghanistan? Moving towards democracy? Maybe, although large chunks of the country still seem to be in the hands of the Warlords; the government recently banned foreign TV broadcasts; little attempt is being made to put into practice any of the liberal-pleasing promises of improvements in women's rights. The world was more upset by the destruction of those Buddha statues than the people who were trying to make a living on the site. Perhaps you're right that many of the marchers have no plans about making a new Iraq. In that respect, Blair and Bush would probably have fitted right in.

On the other hand, what if you are wrong?
What, indeed? Maybe the Kurds in the North would be in fear of a chemical attack from Saddam. Although, funnily enough, they are now. You know what's even more funny, David? Until the US stirred up the hornets, they weren't living in fear. Oh, abject poverty, yes, but they weren't a nation expecting to be the soft target for a swift response from a wounded empire. Still, a few thousand dead through the use of chemical weapons would be a small price to pay to, um, ensure nobody dies from chemical weapons? Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would rather starve to death under an American occupation instead of a Saddam regime, wouldn't they? You seem quite sure about that. And the downtrodden of Baghdad, the opposition to that regime - they would rather be blown up by the dozen than picked off in ones and twos by the secret police, wouldn't they?

Not bombing is the difficult choice.

To sit at home in Belgravia or DC, watching CNN with a glass of brandy, muttering "a shame about the collateral damage, but..." is the easy choice. To sneer and smear hundreds and thousands of decent, ordinary people for their belief in something moral. To pretend that a well-fed journalist in London whose only risk is that they might have to get up early to blether on a Channel Four News Breakfast Special can command the authority of Iraqis shivering in the Middle East. These, David, are the easy choices.

 
TRUST US, WE'RE THE GOVERNMENT: The British government are very keen for us to trust their word. "Believe us" they say. But should we? The Guardian Diary carried a short story about Jack Straw last week. He made the BBC bring forward the taping of their Iraq debate last week - so he could get to the England-Australia football match. As it was, he still was out his seat before the titles had been rolled. There's a measure of how far Straw cares about public opinion - he's quite prepared to talk to us providing he can work his freebie ticket lifestyle round it.
FYI: England lost to Australia. All commentators had expected the English to totally walk over the former colony. I'm sure it's not an omen, Jack.

 
BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE: Channel Four have put the Bremner, Bird and Fortune Iraqspecial online; in both script form and four pieces of real player-friendly video. Above all, the one thing this is not about is oil...

 
REPORTING FROM THE EDGE OF MADNESS: BBC News, this morning - "it's believed the [South Korea underground fire] wasn't an act of terrorism, but was started deliberately" (in a tone which suggested that terrorism is a natural phenomenon).

 
THAT'LL TEACH THEM TO LEAVE BAGHDAD OFF THE FOXCAST: What's surprising is not so much that Iraq have kicked Fox news out, but that they let them in in the first place.
Seriously, though, bad move by Iraq - assuming the American missiles go as awry this time round as they did last time, the more sceptical the news service having to report the baby powder destruction, the better for their PR.
Of course, the US started the expelling journalists thing, kicking out one of Iraq's people at the UN because his presence was "harmfull to the US' interests" - presumably because he was reporting that not everybody in the UN was rolling over and saying "Yessir, misser Bush sir."
The other thing noteworthy in the MediaGuardian report is Murdoch's claim that the good thing about the war would be getting the price of a barrel down to USD20. "Better than any tax cut in any country" simpers the ageing lothario. Of course he'd say that, since he arranges his business interests to avoid paying all but the merest of taxes.

 
HOW THE WAR WILL BE WON: If you're wondering how Clear Channel will be covering the war, Internalmemos.com can satisfy your curiosity without the need for you to tune to them or even wait for a bomb of three thousand to be dropped on the heads of the masses yearning to be free. They want KFBK to own the war, to own being first, and to make the idly curious into a "future cumer" (sic). Clear Channel have got the break bumpers loaded and ready to roll. C'mon, George... give 'em what they want.

 
WHICH SIDE ARE WE ON, BOYS, WHICH SIDE ARE WE ON?: The job of covering the two million person march must have been a real trial for some of the press. The Mail On Sunday, for example, can only have been in terrified confusion. It's a big anti-Blair march. But it's popular protest, and not by people told to march by their country landowning landlords. Who do we support? They produced a little sidebar about previous popular marches - oddly including the people who mashed down the Mall for Bryan May and Atomic Kitten Jubilee Gig as demonstrating "in support of the monarchy" and decided, in the end, that the people out on Saturday were marching to show how far New Labour and Middle England had parted the ways. The trouble is, it seems, that Blair just hasn't explained the case for war well enough to the people. Nice footwork there, then - the millions weren't protesting about the war, but just complaining they hadn't been bounced into it properly.
An expert on Weekend 24 on Saturday morning had dismissed the march even before it had begun - "this" he smarmed, "isn't democracy; democracy is when you vote." Which kind of misses the point that democracy is meant to be the will of the people; the Prime Minister making a decision and not allowing parliament to debate it isn't democracy either; even a stage managed debate in Westminster would be slightly closer to the popular will than Blair's current stance. Tony's mantra of the week is "sometimes you have to do unpopular things; that is the price of leadership", and a lot of his supporters seem to be trying to make the same point. You'll doubtless have seen letters in most papers saying "Everyone complained when Blair used focus groups and opinion polls to make policy; now he's being attacked for doing something unpopular. Can he ever win?", or words to that effect. But there's a difference between choosing which bills to present to the Commons and designing their contents in order to please the floating voters of Middle England and just deciding to take the country into a war, not allowing any vote on it, and not really explaining why its so vital that we bomb Iraqis anyway.
Another attempt to sideline the marchers was the claim that to protest against the war in Iraq was to "appease Saddam" or otherwise green-light the continued deaths of Iraqis. Blair himself did this in his Glasgow speech. First, he claimed there would be no march for the "victims of Saddam" - erm, actually, Tony, there have been. Over the last twenty years, back when your chums in the White House were doing deals with the bastards. Then: "But as you watch your TV pictures of the march, ponder this: if there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for. If there are 1 million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started. (Presumably Tony has decided that the Iran-Iraq war was started by Iraq now, whereas surely Iran must carry a lot of the blame?) Equally, though, Tony could have ruminated that, when the march reached 500,000 souls, that would have been roughly the number that the UN expects to be casualties of even a brief war. (David Aaronvitch has raised an eyebrow that this half a million have started to be turned from 'casualties' to 'deaths' - it's a fair point; many hundreds of thousands will only be seriously injured, burned, left starving or homeless.) Yes, Saddam has a lot of blood on his hands. He has killed that many over the last twenty years. Rumsfeld is planning to rack up the same number in six weeks. It's deeply offensive to suggest that the people in London, in Adelaide, in Sydney were marching in support of Saddam. The were marching for the Iraqi people, not for their oppressor.
A similar take on this has been to try and use the dismissal of the Countryside March against the Anti-War march - the CA trample through London didn't mean very much because nobody had thought to provide a unfying factor for the march. So, while some were marching for the right to continue setting hounds on wildlife, others were there because rural Post Offices were being closed. With no one banner behind which people mustered, there was no real way of reading exactly what the will of these people was, beyond a vague "Country Folks Get A Rough Deal." This weekend, critics had been attempting to suggest that there was a similar split in the marchers because "some people would never support a war; others would support a UN sanctioned war; still others would like there to never be any war ever again." But this actually was the whole point - there were probably as many alternative ideas as there were marchers, but the one thing that unified them was: "Not this war; not like this."
They can try and demolish the message of Saturday any which way, but one out of every thirty people was in London to say: No. You can ignore those voices if you choose. But don't expect to be forgiven.

 
FOXWATCH: We're just mopping up some bits and pieces we noted down over the weekend, and we wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that we're obsessed with Fox, but Saturday afternoon (UK time), with what must have been the largest global protest ever, they knew what the big story was: The 300th episode of The Simpsons. Not that they ignored the marches around the globe; the fair and unbiased news team had a person in New York sniffing at the numbers - "there's less than 100,000 people here, that's why nobody's interested" (maybe there wasn't such a huge turnout because the adverts for it were rejected?) "there's the usual celebrity suspects" (this, remember, is the unbiased news reporter) and then, asked by the anchor if there had been any trouble, the reporter replied "No, but its when they disperse that the trouble happens." Obviously, there was no trouble. But anyone watching Fox would have been given the impression that was because it was about to.

 
THREE-DOM?: Curious that the BBC banned a folk music group from the Radio 3 World Music Awards because it was afraid that the group would use the platform to make an anti-war statement. Interesting that the fear that the Labour Scottish Conference might be used to make pro-war statements didn't hamper the live coverage of that, isn't it?

 
THE NEWS PEOPLE SAID, HAY WHAT YOU DOING IN BED: Jesus, Tony. Two million people march against you. Your party is against you. Public opinion is against you. And now, even 70's novelty yokel popstars The Wurzels are against you. Thankfully, they chose to recreate John and Yoko's bed-in, and not the nudity for peace business.

 
FAIR AND UNBIASED: "Do you think the [US] government has gone over the top with this terror warning?" asked the Fox News anchor of some "terrorist expert" on Saturday night. She seemed totally unaware that her face was being squeezed out by a huge, centrally placed "Terror Alert: High" aston which had been coloured to look more red than orange. Or at least of the possibility that the media were helping fuel the panic, anyway. But why is the alert still at orange when the basis for it turned out to be false? Surely the US wasn't trying to keep people in their homes on protest day, could they?
The being told to stockpile food and water must have been a real pisser for the people who fell for the millennium bug panic - they'll just be using up the last of their laid-in supplies of rice and water from 31.12.99 about now, won't they? Just when they thought they'd never have to eat risotto again...

 
THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN THE WAR STARTS: Hats off to the Guardian for an uncompromising G2 on Valentines' Day, where instead of the usual guff about knickers and cards they gave the space over to The Things We Weren't Supposed To Know About The Last Gulf War. Especially interesting was Peter Arnett's memoir of how the Older Bush's adminstration attempted to rubbish his reports for CNN when the smart bombs turned out to not be as smart as all that...